What the Bartender Sees
Having tended bar at Glascott’s Groggery for five years, I’ve had the chance to do a fair amount of people-watching. I have a pretty good idea who comes to our neighborhood bar, and why. Glascott’s has been in business for 70 years in Lincoln Park, one of Chicago’s liveliest neighborhoods with a mix of professionals, artists, young families, and students from nearby DePaul University.
I’ve seen my share of promotions, too, everything from new-brand introductions to traffic-drivers for a slow night. I’m a grad student in marketing, so I pay attention to them. I’m a bartender, so I have opinions on them. From behind the taps, I can tell you that a few bar promotions are wildly successful, most are mediocre, and a handful are just plain bad for business.
The Good Whoever thought Sept. 9 would be an auspicious day for promotion? Last year, before the threat of Y2K, we all faced the threat of 9-9-99, a date that mimics 9999, the shutdown code for most modern computers. Media outlets itchy for doomsday stories speculated that a programming glitch would shut down computer systems worldwide.
Our manager, Pat Glascott, saw the chance for a once-in-a-lifetime event, so we threw The 9.9.99 Party. The first 99 people who came after 9 p.m. that Thursday night paid $9.99 for unlimited drinks until midnight. We played up our old-fashioned key cash registers (no computers here) and our image as a traditional bar where a power outage wouldn’t stop the fun (or the beer).
Sure, it was kind of hokey, but it was very effective. We only had flyers, a window banner, and two-weeks of word-of-mouth, and the place was packed. People were coming in asking about it for a whole week before, and several folks told me “I’ll definitely be there” – and these weren’t even our regulars.
People started showing up before 8 p.m., and the 99 party invitations sold out in 15 minutes. Heck, they would have gone sooner, but that was as fast as the bartenders could register them long-hand. Still, no one was upset about being left out – customers 100 and up stayed anyway, and the bar was near-capacity all night. (The lights never flickered, and doomsday never came, by the way.)
The way I see it, two elements made it work: timing and offer. Pat capitalized on the underlying fear of global computer shutdown, and gave people a place to relax and laugh about it. And the offer was great. Where else could you get three hours of quality alcohol for under $10? No place in this neighborhood, friends.
The Bad Nothing kills a promotion quicker than an apathetic staff. I’m not talking about the bar’s staff, I’m talking about the brand’s staff, the “shot girls” who walk around the bar giving out shots as samples. They’re mostly low-key, but there was one night when things went bad – big-time bad.
Bacardi was doing a sampling push for Bacardi Limon in shots and mixed drinks. The sampling staff had a, well, bitter attitude about having to walk around in sexy dresses offering people shots. One griped to me, “I got a college degree so I can walk around a bar all night giving out drinks?”
They wore that attitude all night long. They interrupted customers and said, “Here’s a shot of Bacardi” without asking if folks wanted one. They tossed obnoxious blinking pins at customers. It didn’t go over well. Customers refused the pins and the shots. Samplers kept passing out the damned pins, each with an incessant red light that blinked, blinked, blinked, and couldn’t be turned off. Most of them wound up on the floor, crushed under foot. The floor looked like a bed of hot coals. After several shifts of pin clean-up, I asked them to stop handing them out. Their answer? “Whatever.” Way to endear the brand to me, the guy who could sell it after the samplers had taken their college degrees and bad attitudes and gone home.
For all the money Bacardi must have spent that night, not one customer asked for a drink made with Bacardi – let alone Bacardi Limon. But several people did complain about the mess and the samplers’ attitudes. In the end, we didn’t care about the brand, so the customers didn’t, either. All that happened was a mess and a waste of resources for both the bar and Bacardi.
The Ugly Truth I’ve learned by watching that, for a promotion to work, it has to really connect with customers – and with the bar’s staff. Our contact with patrons is immediate and often intimate. Maybe a promotion could work without employee enthusiasm, but I doubt it. A bar is about fun and service; mix those with active staff participation and good timing, and you’ve got a shot at success.
Just leave the blinking pins at home.
